Fiction

The year Father Christmas vanished, the other Holidays gathered together to fashion a replacement. Each volunteered something of themselves in their best approximation of how they remembered the bygone Holiday.  Valentine shrugged off his red ...

Shannon was waiting at the threshold of the patio, balancing a metal tray of shrimp between her shoulder and her wrist. "It's very important work, I think," said the first man. "Yes, well, of course ...

Monica walks home from the coffee shop, her flip flops slapping the uneven sidewalk. Her mind is cloudy; she was supposed to be studying for an exam but instead got lost in memories. She cringes ...

Dearest Seori of House Yunawon, Have you been sleeping well? I’m writing this just as I have been stirred to waking by the most mysterious yet magnificent of dreams. Something tells me that I must ...

She left the path and stepped into the woods. Fallen branches crunched underfoot. A honeyed sunlight spilled in through the trees, glazing the forest in an amber glow.  The air was redolent with that easy ...

It opened. Right there in front of me. It opened.  I would like to say it surprised me, but I was expecting it. So I wasn’t surprised, per se. I was more awed that it ...

First of all, let me say: Fuck you, asshole! You’re alive!  I’m only kidding, kind of.  I for real think it’s cool that if you’re reading this, it most likely means you are human and ...

You had to be a certain kind of person to own a business called Blood of Christ Wine, Beer, and Liquor, and we never quite figured out what kind of person that was. But Nick ...

When I was a child a mendicant man came to our village.  He wasn’t old, but everything about him was gray. His hair was the shade of dirty ashes and his skin greasy as old ...

Imogen had given birth. She’d had a daughter. She had pushed for hours, from the time the sun rose until it crept back down and disappeared beyond the horizon, like an animal burrowing into the ...

I found the Polaroid on the road, but I knew it came from the Uber.  I’d gone out for drinks with coworkers, and rather than take the train home, I figured I’d treat myself to ...

I was six when Dad left Mum and me in a storm of curses and broken dishes. After that, it was quieter at home, and I saw Dad every second weekend.  He gave me the ...

There’s no grand opening, no advertising. There’s just one endless summer day after another, and then the curl of fall leaves across the storefront on mainstreet, and when the leaves touch the ground you look ...

I’ve lived in many places, but I want to stay forever at the Falling Action Café.  A little bell tinkles when customers trail in, and the owner, Frieda, beams every time. She helps them find ...

The afternoon light from the window barely makes it around the old bulky fridge in my cramped galley kitchen. I scrub a white plate with a neon green silicone sponge, the sleeves of my gray ...

My grandmother stared at the wall when we came to visit her in the nursing home in Santa Fe. The smell of sickness waited outside the room but didn’t dare come inside.  “Shooting stars are ...

The old man sidles up to her bench in Central Park.  She’s drinking her latte and listening, with equal parts frustration and fascination, to yet another podcast about how everyone has some kind of Great ...

Opening the bedroom window overlooking the garden, Raymond finds floodlight dahlias sweating in the monkey grass, shaggy petals hit by heavy rain. Their battered heads fall, childlike in the mist, leaning down to the ground ...

The tree unstuck its roots from the ground before walking into the hardware store, a trail of dirt behind him as he made his way through the sliding doors. A clerk greeted him, asked what ...

I should have known that the scab on my chest beside my left nipple was more than just a scab. I couldn’t remember ever cutting or scratching myself.  I should have known something was off ...

As usual, Ellyn Mueller sits alone during 5th grade recess, leaning against the chain-link fence that edges the Baytown Elementary School playground. Reaching between her bumped-up knees, she draws a rose on the blacktop, using ...

You wake up one morning and there is a $20 bill folded like an accordion in the left side of your vulva, just between your labia majora and labia minora.  You get out of bed ...

I was too young to remember the pandemic, but I guess that’s when it all began. People were too afraid to touch each other, and face ID was contactless. Epidemiologists said that we could limit ...

Each morning, my grandmother put on her face.  I watched as she painted lips, shaped eyes. From her brush bloomed brows. Her nose, like clay, sculpted. From the mirror, she smiled. The ritual was complete. ...